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Are they producing a lot of good content and the blogs are just the locations where that great original content which users are interacting with, is located ? If they look like they are there just for SEO, the search engines will catchup when they see patterns of artificial links. They just have a lot of other spam to catch-up with first :).
I would not look at that technique and start doing it yourself.
You can download the entire crawl and see if there's actually that many pages. Or post the URL here.
You can also test using a crawling software tool like Xenu or Screaming Frog to test it.
You can also post/private message the link here and I can take a look.
Yes, as Ryan said, this is the nature of the internet. Just like you can write about anything, anybody, you can create a link to anybody and just to clarify, the block that Ryan is talking about is essentially that if someone linked to you, you could "technically" setup a block so anybody visiting your website from that link, would not be able to access your website..but it would still get counted as a link from that website to yours.
I would recommend you read this article where Overstock.com was penalized for offering discount coupons/discount to students/universities for links.
I would not suggest doing a Press Release for SEO Only reason. Think about this from a user's perspective:
1. Is the reader going to feel he is reading a news or a advertorial ?* 2. Do you have something worthwhile to report via a press release ?* 3. If you were the reader, would you be interested in reading that PR ? And if yes, would you be satisfied after reading it ?
Next and the most important. DO NOT do anchor text links. After the several rounds of algorithm updates, those kinds of links don't help. If you really get a decent reason to do the PR, do it. But then, just link to the relevant page or your homepage with the name of the business / law firm. Don't do anchor text.
I know this kind of leads you into a total opposite direction, but with thinking about how many anchor text links, I can see where you were headed. I hope this helps.
What are you using to accomplish this ? CSS ? HTML5 ? AJAX or something else ? All these technologies have a Search Engine Friendly way of doing it. It really depends how you are doing it. It sounds like AJAX to me, but could also be CSS...so..depends.
Considering the penalty issues and whether the rest of your link profile is natural or not, I actually recommend sticking with what you are thinking, 1 for YouTube and 1 for Flickr rather then distributing it onto multiple sites for now.
The best way to rank for your brand name with other/more URLs that you control to some extent would be the social media ones. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn etc.
Great answers by Justin and Aran. One thing that I'd like to add is make sure that guest posting or any other specific kind of link building is not a major portion of your links. A decent mix aka Natural Links. In simple words, don't over do any one kind/technique of links and you should be good. And as Justin and Aran said, the intent behind guest posting should be to get branding and exposure. Getting your brand in front of the readers of that website. As far as the DA/PA and other metrics are concerned, they would come with it. I would look at what brings you more readers, maybe some traffic. You would want to try and engage with the community. So if you look at Guest Posts in terms of exposure instead of PA/DA, you tend to get better results long term in my opinion.
There shouldn't be any issue. The question I'd like to ask is, do you have a lot of outgoing links ? Is this a clients/testimonials/resources kind of a page ? Are you doing it for your users or for SEO reasons for the site gaining the link ? Worst case scenario, or if you are concerned, add a rel=nofollow.
I agree with Virage. As long as it makes business sense and the volume of your OOS products is not more then your current products. I would not want to have 500 OOS products and 50 In stock products on a site.
Stop linking to that page from your navigation (obviously) and then if somebody does indeed navigate to your OOS product page from elsewhere on the web, then they can see it's OOS and see related products and so on. That's a much better user experience in my opinion vs a 404.
Think of link building as conventional brand building / PR and you will have all your answers. If you/your website gets mentioned by New York Times in an article/blog/news vs a small blogger, which one is more important. Simply put, if the website that is linking to you has links to itself, it's an important link. Your best bet is to look at the Domain Authority Score to get a top level view. As for anchor text, I would avoid overdoing anything. Use your brand name to build up the authority and you can outrank a lot more people in the long run, however in the short run, anchor text might work out better. Depends what your goals are. I hope this helps.
If it's great content, it might make more sense to keep it on your website. Some blog posting is okay, but too much of any one kind of links will only cause issues, both short term and long term. Think about Directory Links 5 years ago. Everybody got 500 Directory Submissions for $50 and so on, and those are the kinds of links people are getting Unnatural link warnings for.
So I'd recommend evaluating your link strategy and only build quality links, rather then faster links, instant approval links, focus on quality and user engagement vs quantity.
I hope this helps.
I agree with Neil. It's not bad, just a good user practice to keep them lowercase so that's there's no confusion. The best bet for you would to be to use a consistent format and mimic that in your canonical URLs so only that variation gets crawled and indexed.
You can try and sending the whois emails on each of those domains a polite or a C&D kind of a letter/email and see if they respond. If you have 500 such links, maybe 50 will get down and then respond to the request with the results that you tried and some of them were taken down, the rest they are not responding and there's nothing you can do about it.
Just look at the kind of keywords people use to hit your internal / deep pages from Search. Specially your brand keywords and you could target some of those. Just make sure you are not doing too many of the same kinds of links.
You could also do:
"My Brand Name" + Red
Red + "My Brand Name"
Red Widgets at My Brand Name
Red Widgets by My Brand Name
My Brand Name Red Widgets
Red Widgets Partial Brand
and so on.
The best bet is to have an alternate strategy in place to build content and authoritative links. There's always that little bit of risk of drop in rankings in scenarios like these, which is going to happen one day anyway. The question is what to do till then.
I would look at starting to add more content, strengthen the pages as well as working on the overall domain authority with brand links and citations etc.
Ayite, think of Link Building as Brand Building. Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts. You will have to come up with things that people would want to link to. Think of a combination of Link Bait, Infographics, Press Releases, Some Guest Posts and other misc links. Just a little bit of everything in your niche. Not too much of anything.
I would also start with analyzing your competition backlinks and see how and where they got/get their links from. Try to get some of those kinds of links.
It's a slow and steady, painful, expensive process. But it works.
Spun content has no value for the user. I would therefore suggest investing time and effort in building value to the user. If you are able to do that, you will gain loyalty amongst your users. Depending upon the niche and nature of your website, your user's may share your website on their blogs and social media. They may also come back to your website and so on. That does what Google is looking for in real sites...sites that should rank.
Saeed I'd suggest you scale it down to maybe 5 lenses about specific niches or maybe just 1-2. Too many links of one type, is manipulative link building. If there was no SEO benefit, would you still do it ? I would consider spending the same time in strengthening the content, internal links and or trying to acquire 2-5 high authority links or maybe just 1 high authority link, the kind of link that money can't buy....a pure natural link. The impact of that kind of link would be much more then the benefit of the 50 squidoo lenses and the possible risk.